Click on link to download radio show as an mp3 file:
http://www.yousendit.com/download/Q01IZm1aMGs0b0JjR0E9PQ
Friday, 29 August 2008
On the Record 11 Sept
Click on link to download Radio show as an mp3 file from:
https://www.yousendit.com/download/Q01IZm1aQk5lM1R2Wmc9PQ
https://www.yousendit.com/download/Q01IZm1aQk5lM1R2Wmc9PQ
Monday, 25 August 2008
Sunday, 24 August 2008
Radio Prog: On the Record 21 Aug
Click on link to download my radio show as an mp3 for your i-tunes/media player:
http://www.yousendit.com/download/Q01FbGtLbEpRYTlFQlE9PQ
http://www.yousendit.com/download/Q01FbGtLbEpRYTlFQlE9PQ
Radio Prog: On the Record 28 Aug
Click on link to download my radio show as an mp3 for your i-tunes/media player:
https://www.yousendit.com/download/Q01IYUlsSWhxRTFFQlE9PQ
https://www.yousendit.com/download/Q01IYUlsSWhxRTFFQlE9PQ
Monday, 18 August 2008
Duh web...Duh!
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Sunday, 17 August 2008
Byron - She Walks In Beauty
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender lightWhich heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless graceWhich waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender lightWhich heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless graceWhich waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
17 Aug 08: Tyrone 3-14 Dublin 1-8
Tyrone: J Devine; R McMenamin, Justin McMahon, C Gourley; D Harte (1-01), C Gormley (0-01), P Jordan; C Holmes, E McGinley (0-01); B Dooher (capt) (0-03), B McGuigan, Joe McMahon (1-01); T McGuigan (0-02), S Cavanagh (1-02 (0-01f)), C McCullagh (0-03).
Subs used: M Penrose for T McGuigan (56 mins), D McCaul for Jordan (63), R Mellon for Dooher (65), K Hughes for Holmes (66), O Mulligan for B McGuigan (68).
Dublin: S Cluxton; D Henry, R McConnell, P Griffin; C Moran, B Cullen, B Cahill (0-01); C Whelan, S Ryan; D Connolly, J Sherlock, K Bonner; A Brogan (capt), C Keaney (1-01), T Quinn (0-02, 2f).
Subs used: B Brogan (0-03) for A Brogan (6 mins, inj), P Casey for Connolly (48), M Vaughan (0-01, 1f) for Sherlock, P McMahon for Quinn (both 54), E Fennell for McConnell (63).
Referee: Aidan Mangan (Kerry).
Subs used: M Penrose for T McGuigan (56 mins), D McCaul for Jordan (63), R Mellon for Dooher (65), K Hughes for Holmes (66), O Mulligan for B McGuigan (68).
Dublin: S Cluxton; D Henry, R McConnell, P Griffin; C Moran, B Cullen, B Cahill (0-01); C Whelan, S Ryan; D Connolly, J Sherlock, K Bonner; A Brogan (capt), C Keaney (1-01), T Quinn (0-02, 2f).
Subs used: B Brogan (0-03) for A Brogan (6 mins, inj), P Casey for Connolly (48), M Vaughan (0-01, 1f) for Sherlock, P McMahon for Quinn (both 54), E Fennell for McConnell (63).
Referee: Aidan Mangan (Kerry).
Saturday, 16 August 2008
The magic of McGahern
As a teenager, Joseph O'Connor was so enthralled by the work of John McGahern he spent many evenings copying out - then reworking - one of his exquisite short stories. It taught him how to become a writer.
The first short story I wrote was a work of genius. It was austere and lovely, full of elegant sentences and sharp insights. Any reviewer would have called it tremendously impressive. Because the first short story I wrote was by John McGahern. It's called "Sierra Leone" and it appears in the 1979 collection Getting Through, a copy of which had been purchased by my father. A keen reader of Irish fiction, he felt always, like my late mother, a particular respect for McGahern, who had suffered much through being true to his calling. McGahern's novel The Dark had been banned in Ireland for obscenity, and its author had lost his job as a teacher. But, remarkably, he seemed accepting of fate and circumstance. He simply kept writing, never complained. He did not make appearances on chat shows.
The Dark by John Mcgahern Faber, £6.99 Buy it at the Guardian bookshop In "Sierra Leone", two lovers meet in a Dublin bar to analyse their complicated affair. I was 16 the year I first read it. Complicated affairs interested me. My English teacher, John Burns, a wonderful man, who would rage like Lear and weep at a line of Yeats, said writing could be a beneficial pastime for teenagers. It was the one thing he ever told us that was completely wrong.
Writing was like attempting to juggle with mud. I would sit in my bedroom, gawping at a blank jotter, wishing I had the foggiest inkling as to what might be written. This McGahern fellow - he was good, my parents were right - often wrote about rural Leitrim and the wilds of Roscommon, and crops, and cows, and taking in the hay, and buckets, and threshing, and artificial inseminators. But we had no hedgerows or calves in the 1970s Dublin estate I called home. We had no thwarted farmers, no maiden aunts on bicycles, no small-town solicitors, no cattle-dealing IRA veterans, and few enough inseminations, or opportunities for same, of even the non-artificial kind. Simply put, there was nothing in Glenageary to write about. You could call it the original failure of the creative imagination without which no writer ever got going.
Whenever I tried to write, there was only frustration. One evening, in dismal hopelessness, I found myself copying out "Sierra Leone" word for word. I ached to write a story. So I wrote one of his. I must have felt that the act of writing would make the words somehow mine. I suppose it was comparable to aspirant pop-stars throwing shapes and pulling pouts in the bathroom mirror. But something richer and more interesting was going on, too. McGahern was teaching me to read, not to write: to see the presences hidden in the crannies of a text, the realities the words are gesturing towards. Perhaps this is what pulses at the core of the desire to read: the yearning for intense communion with words we love. Not just with what they are saying, but with the words themselves. Perhaps every reader is re-writing the story.
A couple of evenings later, I transcribed the McGahern piece again. This time I dared to alter a couple of names. The male lead became Sean (my father's name). I christened his girlfriend Deborah (after the punk singer Debbie Harry). Our next-door neighbour, Jack Mulcahy, had his name nicked for the barman. This felt taboo. It was like editing the Bible. I was raised in a home where books were revered. My parents considered it disreputable even to dog-ear a volume's pages. To interfere with a story would have been regarded as a form of sacrilege. Under the spell of McGahern, I became a teenage blasphemer.
Every few nights I'd guiltily rewrite the latest adaptation, changing the grammar here, a phrasing there. I'd move around events, break up the paragraphs, or tell exactly the same story from a different point of view. (In which case, of course, it would not be the same story at all - an important lesson in itself.) I must have written 30 or 40 versions. The heroine's black hair became auburn or yellow, and finally - exultantly! - "strawberry blonde". I learned the importance of punctuation in a story. A question mark could change things. A well-placed full stop had the force of a slap. Before long, I was murdering McGahern's masterfully sculpted characters, replacing them with my own pitifully scanty puppets. The pub became a discotheque, the couple acquired flares; I engaged them, married them, bought them a bungalow in the suburbs, then a collection of Planxty records and a second-hand lawnmower. The lovers in the story were starting to seem familiar. They would not have appeared out of place in Arnold Grove, Glenageary.
I rechristened them "Adam and Eve", after a church on the Dublin quays not far from my father's childhood home. I altered their appearances, their way of speaking. I was afraid to admit it, but I knew who they were becoming. They roamed this fictive otherworld, this Eden designed in Leitrim, talking to each other about all sorts of things: how much they loved novels, how books shouldn't be dog-eared. Sometimes they quarrelled. I would have them reconcile. I could almost feel the firelight of that pub on my face as I watched my parents materialise through the prose.
At one point I could have made a reasonable stab at reciting the entire text of "Sierra Leone" by heart. It appeared breathtakingly simple, as though it had taken no effort to compose. I recall, as I write now, one of the short, plain sentences: "Her hair shone dark blue in the light." It is a sentence that could be written by almost anyone, but few writers are as aware as McGahern was of that strange ache in the heart caused by ordinary precise words, placed carefully, in order, quietly.
Each man kills the thing he loves. And so the vandalism continued, over many an evening, with me editing and rewriting this once perfect story, slashing and burning, twisting, demolishing, with all the respectful deference of a wrecking ball in a cathedral, until gradually, over the span of my teenage years, every trace of McGahern was bludgeoned out of the text. Sierra Leone had become Glenageary. The story had been desecrated, but at least the resulting ruin was mine.
When, once, in my later life, I had the opportunity of relating this tale of destruction to the master whose work I had so abused, he replied, somewhat gravely: "Mine's a pint."
Dublin appears again and again in McGahern's work, sometimes at a distance but often centrally. His exquisite short stories are peopled by migrant characters who see the metropolis as labyrinth of possibilities. Here is a Dublin of tatty dancehalls and uneasy courtships, of kisses in damp doorways and unfulfilled hungerings. His citizens are stalwarts of the city's rural-born workforce, who take the first available bus home to the countryside on a Friday evening and the last one back to Bedsit-Land on a Sunday night. They are, in short, like most Dubliners were at the time, and as many are now, despite the new prosperity. Their flings and farewells make for writing of extraordinary beauty, with the city as forlorn backdrop to the search for love.
McGahern's work acknowledges that Dublin (like capitals everywhere) is largely a community of migrants with conflicted loyalties. And I think of his explorations - so destabilising in their way - as opening a path for a number of subsequent writers. In that context, it is striking that much of the most compelling fiction about the city has been produced by authors who grew up somewhere else. Ulsterman Patrick McCabe's The Dead School and London-born Philip Casey's The Fabulists offer commanding reflections on a place that changed radically in the 1970s, as political failure and corruption began to wreak havoc. In The Book of Evidence, Wexford-born John Banville produced a spellbinding novel set in the furtive Dublin of that Gubu era, a nighttown of whispered secrets and compromised positions. I find it hard to imagine how these and other great novels could have been written without the presence of McGahern on the Irish scene. For me, he looms behind everyone: an Easter Island figure, with the ineluctable shadow - and the sternness - suggested by such an embodiment.
At University College Dublin in the 80s, I read The Barracks, The Dark and more of the stories. I found them strange, always enthralling, stylistically flawless, but more touching than almost anything I had read. His account, clearly autobiographical, of a young man's early days at university - the first of his family ever to know such an experience - moves me still. At the time, the vogue among my friends was for Latin American magic realism. In those years, it often seemed that no novel was worthy of the name unless it contained a talking leopard or a 15-page sentence. Against this blizzard of vowelly pyrotechnics McGahern's work stood solid, starkly implacable, like a dry-stone wall in a windstorm. I loved its quiet faith, its insistence on its own terms. And then came his masterpiece Amongst Women, the most important Irish novel of my lifetime.
So much has been written and said about this sparely magnificent book. It conjures a world that is absolutely specific to itself, down to the most minuscule, seemingly inconsequential detail, but in so doing achieves the alchemy of saying something about every life. Not for nothing did this novel become a perennial bestseller in Ireland, as well as being garlanded with critical accolades. The family it depicts is somehow every Irish family of a certain era, held together by its secrets, bound by its evasions, by a nexus of loyalties, only one of which is love. Indeed, it is difficult not to read the Morans as embodying the uneasy nation in which they exist.
The book draws so subtly from that well of Irish familial images and returns them to us reimagined, made wholly new. Moran, the disillusioned republican, burnished hard by pain, walks through the book like a living ghost, through drifts of memories of nights on the run, promises broken, responsibilities ducked. A man grown strange, even to himself, so brutal yet impossible to hate. The episode at Moran's funeral, is the most powerful fictional scene I have read since my adolescence. We see the local hacks of the two conservative parties snickering together in the rural cemetery, as the embittered old revolutionary is finally buried. Sometimes great writers know things they don't know. This tableau was composed a decade before the Celtic Tiger padded into Ireland, but it is the most ruthless comment imaginable on that ambiguous, sharp-toothed beast.
His final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, took 11 years to make and surprised many of its creator's admirers by addressing that rarest of Irish literary subjects: happiness. Here on the lakeside, near to Gloria Bog, little is happening beyond the everyday syncopations - yet, as ever, McGahern unearths resonant beauty. Gossip is a currency, as always in Ireland, and his dialogue abounds with the juiciness of popular speech. It is his most audaciously structured book, almost completely devoid of plot, suggesting reams about its characters while rarely telling you anything about them. Reading it is like reading everything he wrote - like moving to a place you've never lived in before, where you don't know the neighbours or how things work. But thanks to his artistry, you want to know them.
Not long after his death, Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories was published, a sort of correction to the Collected Stories that had appeared to great acclaim in 1992. The later collection is the finest body of short stories published by any Irish writer in recent years, and serves as a moving valediction to the characters McGahern made his own. They drift through these unforgettable and assiduously crafted miniatures like the archetypes of a modern folklore: the inarticulate lover, the distant, damaged father, the ill-used stepmother, the pilgrim between two worlds, the schoolteacher who doubts or despises his vocation, the sufferer of sexual loneliness. Several times we encounter the former student for the Catholic priesthood who abandoned that path on the verge of ordination. Again and again, there is the desperate invitation to marry, usually dismissed or evaded, misunderstood. These are lives marked by abrupt turnings, roads not taken, promises broken, the hopes of childhood crushed, but somehow a faith in the world survives, a notion that redemption is possible.
The first short story I wrote was a work of genius. It was austere and lovely, full of elegant sentences and sharp insights. Any reviewer would have called it tremendously impressive. Because the first short story I wrote was by John McGahern. It's called "Sierra Leone" and it appears in the 1979 collection Getting Through, a copy of which had been purchased by my father. A keen reader of Irish fiction, he felt always, like my late mother, a particular respect for McGahern, who had suffered much through being true to his calling. McGahern's novel The Dark had been banned in Ireland for obscenity, and its author had lost his job as a teacher. But, remarkably, he seemed accepting of fate and circumstance. He simply kept writing, never complained. He did not make appearances on chat shows.
The Dark by John Mcgahern Faber, £6.99 Buy it at the Guardian bookshop In "Sierra Leone", two lovers meet in a Dublin bar to analyse their complicated affair. I was 16 the year I first read it. Complicated affairs interested me. My English teacher, John Burns, a wonderful man, who would rage like Lear and weep at a line of Yeats, said writing could be a beneficial pastime for teenagers. It was the one thing he ever told us that was completely wrong.
Writing was like attempting to juggle with mud. I would sit in my bedroom, gawping at a blank jotter, wishing I had the foggiest inkling as to what might be written. This McGahern fellow - he was good, my parents were right - often wrote about rural Leitrim and the wilds of Roscommon, and crops, and cows, and taking in the hay, and buckets, and threshing, and artificial inseminators. But we had no hedgerows or calves in the 1970s Dublin estate I called home. We had no thwarted farmers, no maiden aunts on bicycles, no small-town solicitors, no cattle-dealing IRA veterans, and few enough inseminations, or opportunities for same, of even the non-artificial kind. Simply put, there was nothing in Glenageary to write about. You could call it the original failure of the creative imagination without which no writer ever got going.
Whenever I tried to write, there was only frustration. One evening, in dismal hopelessness, I found myself copying out "Sierra Leone" word for word. I ached to write a story. So I wrote one of his. I must have felt that the act of writing would make the words somehow mine. I suppose it was comparable to aspirant pop-stars throwing shapes and pulling pouts in the bathroom mirror. But something richer and more interesting was going on, too. McGahern was teaching me to read, not to write: to see the presences hidden in the crannies of a text, the realities the words are gesturing towards. Perhaps this is what pulses at the core of the desire to read: the yearning for intense communion with words we love. Not just with what they are saying, but with the words themselves. Perhaps every reader is re-writing the story.
A couple of evenings later, I transcribed the McGahern piece again. This time I dared to alter a couple of names. The male lead became Sean (my father's name). I christened his girlfriend Deborah (after the punk singer Debbie Harry). Our next-door neighbour, Jack Mulcahy, had his name nicked for the barman. This felt taboo. It was like editing the Bible. I was raised in a home where books were revered. My parents considered it disreputable even to dog-ear a volume's pages. To interfere with a story would have been regarded as a form of sacrilege. Under the spell of McGahern, I became a teenage blasphemer.
Every few nights I'd guiltily rewrite the latest adaptation, changing the grammar here, a phrasing there. I'd move around events, break up the paragraphs, or tell exactly the same story from a different point of view. (In which case, of course, it would not be the same story at all - an important lesson in itself.) I must have written 30 or 40 versions. The heroine's black hair became auburn or yellow, and finally - exultantly! - "strawberry blonde". I learned the importance of punctuation in a story. A question mark could change things. A well-placed full stop had the force of a slap. Before long, I was murdering McGahern's masterfully sculpted characters, replacing them with my own pitifully scanty puppets. The pub became a discotheque, the couple acquired flares; I engaged them, married them, bought them a bungalow in the suburbs, then a collection of Planxty records and a second-hand lawnmower. The lovers in the story were starting to seem familiar. They would not have appeared out of place in Arnold Grove, Glenageary.
I rechristened them "Adam and Eve", after a church on the Dublin quays not far from my father's childhood home. I altered their appearances, their way of speaking. I was afraid to admit it, but I knew who they were becoming. They roamed this fictive otherworld, this Eden designed in Leitrim, talking to each other about all sorts of things: how much they loved novels, how books shouldn't be dog-eared. Sometimes they quarrelled. I would have them reconcile. I could almost feel the firelight of that pub on my face as I watched my parents materialise through the prose.
At one point I could have made a reasonable stab at reciting the entire text of "Sierra Leone" by heart. It appeared breathtakingly simple, as though it had taken no effort to compose. I recall, as I write now, one of the short, plain sentences: "Her hair shone dark blue in the light." It is a sentence that could be written by almost anyone, but few writers are as aware as McGahern was of that strange ache in the heart caused by ordinary precise words, placed carefully, in order, quietly.
Each man kills the thing he loves. And so the vandalism continued, over many an evening, with me editing and rewriting this once perfect story, slashing and burning, twisting, demolishing, with all the respectful deference of a wrecking ball in a cathedral, until gradually, over the span of my teenage years, every trace of McGahern was bludgeoned out of the text. Sierra Leone had become Glenageary. The story had been desecrated, but at least the resulting ruin was mine.
When, once, in my later life, I had the opportunity of relating this tale of destruction to the master whose work I had so abused, he replied, somewhat gravely: "Mine's a pint."
Dublin appears again and again in McGahern's work, sometimes at a distance but often centrally. His exquisite short stories are peopled by migrant characters who see the metropolis as labyrinth of possibilities. Here is a Dublin of tatty dancehalls and uneasy courtships, of kisses in damp doorways and unfulfilled hungerings. His citizens are stalwarts of the city's rural-born workforce, who take the first available bus home to the countryside on a Friday evening and the last one back to Bedsit-Land on a Sunday night. They are, in short, like most Dubliners were at the time, and as many are now, despite the new prosperity. Their flings and farewells make for writing of extraordinary beauty, with the city as forlorn backdrop to the search for love.
McGahern's work acknowledges that Dublin (like capitals everywhere) is largely a community of migrants with conflicted loyalties. And I think of his explorations - so destabilising in their way - as opening a path for a number of subsequent writers. In that context, it is striking that much of the most compelling fiction about the city has been produced by authors who grew up somewhere else. Ulsterman Patrick McCabe's The Dead School and London-born Philip Casey's The Fabulists offer commanding reflections on a place that changed radically in the 1970s, as political failure and corruption began to wreak havoc. In The Book of Evidence, Wexford-born John Banville produced a spellbinding novel set in the furtive Dublin of that Gubu era, a nighttown of whispered secrets and compromised positions. I find it hard to imagine how these and other great novels could have been written without the presence of McGahern on the Irish scene. For me, he looms behind everyone: an Easter Island figure, with the ineluctable shadow - and the sternness - suggested by such an embodiment.
At University College Dublin in the 80s, I read The Barracks, The Dark and more of the stories. I found them strange, always enthralling, stylistically flawless, but more touching than almost anything I had read. His account, clearly autobiographical, of a young man's early days at university - the first of his family ever to know such an experience - moves me still. At the time, the vogue among my friends was for Latin American magic realism. In those years, it often seemed that no novel was worthy of the name unless it contained a talking leopard or a 15-page sentence. Against this blizzard of vowelly pyrotechnics McGahern's work stood solid, starkly implacable, like a dry-stone wall in a windstorm. I loved its quiet faith, its insistence on its own terms. And then came his masterpiece Amongst Women, the most important Irish novel of my lifetime.
So much has been written and said about this sparely magnificent book. It conjures a world that is absolutely specific to itself, down to the most minuscule, seemingly inconsequential detail, but in so doing achieves the alchemy of saying something about every life. Not for nothing did this novel become a perennial bestseller in Ireland, as well as being garlanded with critical accolades. The family it depicts is somehow every Irish family of a certain era, held together by its secrets, bound by its evasions, by a nexus of loyalties, only one of which is love. Indeed, it is difficult not to read the Morans as embodying the uneasy nation in which they exist.
The book draws so subtly from that well of Irish familial images and returns them to us reimagined, made wholly new. Moran, the disillusioned republican, burnished hard by pain, walks through the book like a living ghost, through drifts of memories of nights on the run, promises broken, responsibilities ducked. A man grown strange, even to himself, so brutal yet impossible to hate. The episode at Moran's funeral, is the most powerful fictional scene I have read since my adolescence. We see the local hacks of the two conservative parties snickering together in the rural cemetery, as the embittered old revolutionary is finally buried. Sometimes great writers know things they don't know. This tableau was composed a decade before the Celtic Tiger padded into Ireland, but it is the most ruthless comment imaginable on that ambiguous, sharp-toothed beast.
His final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, took 11 years to make and surprised many of its creator's admirers by addressing that rarest of Irish literary subjects: happiness. Here on the lakeside, near to Gloria Bog, little is happening beyond the everyday syncopations - yet, as ever, McGahern unearths resonant beauty. Gossip is a currency, as always in Ireland, and his dialogue abounds with the juiciness of popular speech. It is his most audaciously structured book, almost completely devoid of plot, suggesting reams about its characters while rarely telling you anything about them. Reading it is like reading everything he wrote - like moving to a place you've never lived in before, where you don't know the neighbours or how things work. But thanks to his artistry, you want to know them.
Not long after his death, Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories was published, a sort of correction to the Collected Stories that had appeared to great acclaim in 1992. The later collection is the finest body of short stories published by any Irish writer in recent years, and serves as a moving valediction to the characters McGahern made his own. They drift through these unforgettable and assiduously crafted miniatures like the archetypes of a modern folklore: the inarticulate lover, the distant, damaged father, the ill-used stepmother, the pilgrim between two worlds, the schoolteacher who doubts or despises his vocation, the sufferer of sexual loneliness. Several times we encounter the former student for the Catholic priesthood who abandoned that path on the verge of ordination. Again and again, there is the desperate invitation to marry, usually dismissed or evaded, misunderstood. These are lives marked by abrupt turnings, roads not taken, promises broken, the hopes of childhood crushed, but somehow a faith in the world survives, a notion that redemption is possible.
Friday, 15 August 2008
Stupid words creeping into our language No.2
Literally: A dumbo overheard saying: 'I was literally bowled over by the news'. Aye right, hi! Were you playing cricket at the time, my friend.
Another dumbo overheard saying: 'The film literally blew my head off'. If only, fool!
Another dumbo overheard saying: 'The film literally blew my head off'. If only, fool!
Stupid words creeping into our language No.1
Closure: the act of closing; the state of being closed; a bringing to an end; conclusion.
Such an American word that you hear more and more of these days, especially in the media. People, we don't live in an episode of Friends or Greys Anatomy, so lets not try to talk like we do. Why not use such far out words instead as: conclusion, end, draw a line under, finish or bring to a close.
It's, like, so much, like, more natural!
Such an American word that you hear more and more of these days, especially in the media. People, we don't live in an episode of Friends or Greys Anatomy, so lets not try to talk like we do. Why not use such far out words instead as: conclusion, end, draw a line under, finish or bring to a close.
It's, like, so much, like, more natural!
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
Mark Twain
"Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Tuesday, 12 August 2008
Cool radio stations
Sub FM: http://www.sub.fm/
Kitchen Sisters: www.kitchensisters.org
FiP: www.tinyurl.com/574gx6
WFMU: www.wfmu.org
Resonance FM: www.resonancefm.com
Speechification: www.speechification.org
Touch Radio: www.touchradio.org.uk www.peoplelikeus.org
Kitchen Sisters: www.kitchensisters.org
FiP: www.tinyurl.com/574gx6
WFMU: www.wfmu.org
Resonance FM: www.resonancefm.com
Speechification: www.speechification.org
Touch Radio: www.touchradio.org.uk www.peoplelikeus.org
Madness or genius?
I still haven't made up my mind yet - but hey it'll cut your carbon footprint! One for the headphones definitely:
www.soundtransit.nl
www.soundtransit.nl
Monday, 11 August 2008
China’s netizens swarm amnesty.org
Thousands of netizens in China seized the chance to check out Amnesty International’s main website after it was unblocked in China for the first time, on 1 Aug.
The Chinese cyber-police’s unprecedented move came after international journalists discovered, upon arrival in Beijing for the Olympic Games, that numerous websites - such as those of Wikipedia and BBC Chinese - were blocked inside Olympic media venues. About 30,000 reporters from around the world are expected to cover the Games.
Within the first four days, Amnesty.org received about 14,000 visitors from China — nearly 30 times the visitor count for July. To welcome the new visitors, the organization is now installing a Chinese language section.
Unblocking the sites is a monumental move for the Chinese government especially when it appeared to be tightening its control over media in recent years by banning websites and detaining journalists.
www.amnesty.org/
The Chinese cyber-police’s unprecedented move came after international journalists discovered, upon arrival in Beijing for the Olympic Games, that numerous websites - such as those of Wikipedia and BBC Chinese - were blocked inside Olympic media venues. About 30,000 reporters from around the world are expected to cover the Games.
Within the first four days, Amnesty.org received about 14,000 visitors from China — nearly 30 times the visitor count for July. To welcome the new visitors, the organization is now installing a Chinese language section.
Unblocking the sites is a monumental move for the Chinese government especially when it appeared to be tightening its control over media in recent years by banning websites and detaining journalists.
www.amnesty.org/
Sunday, 10 August 2008
Saturday, 9 August 2008
William Faulkner
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
Best magazine covers
Hmmm... not a great selection in my opinion, I imagine there may be better out there. But if I had to choose it would be no.8.
"And it seemed to me that you would live your life like a candle in the wiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnndddd!"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/gallery/2008/aug/08/pressandpublishing?picture=336315452
"And it seemed to me that you would live your life like a candle in the wiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnndddd!"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/gallery/2008/aug/08/pressandpublishing?picture=336315452
James Blackshaw
This young fookin' genius is playing in the Chapel, Trinity College on Thursday evening 14th August and tickets are free - free in Dublin I tell ye! You can pick them up at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in the college.
http://www.myspace.com/jamesblackshaw
http://www.myspace.com/jamesblackshaw
Friday, 8 August 2008
Right turn Clyde
Lucky man
Alex Cox
Clint Eastwood is acclaimed for his work as both an actor and a director,but the Hollywood star owes everything to the genius of his mentor SergioLeone
http://www.newstatesman.com/200808070029
Alex Cox
Clint Eastwood is acclaimed for his work as both an actor and a director,but the Hollywood star owes everything to the genius of his mentor SergioLeone
http://www.newstatesman.com/200808070029
The Maestro
FILM LEGEND ENNIO MORRICONE TO OPEN THIS YEAR'S ULSTER BANK BELFAST FESTIVAL AT QUEEN'S
Telephone bookings can be made via the Waterfront Box Office(028) 9033 4455
DUE TO DEMAND, EXTRA DATE ADDED - 18TH OCTOBER
Ennio Morricone, the Italian maestro behind some of the most instantly recognisable film music of the last forty years, will visit this island for the first time to perform his only UK and Ireland engagement this year at the Opening Concert of the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen's.
This is a rare live appearance by the Oscar-winning film legend - undoubtedly one of the most skilled, prolific and influential film composers in history. The eagerly anticipated concert takes place at Belfast's Waterfront Hall on Friday 17th October, just days before Morricone's 80th birthday. He will conduct the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra and Belfast Philharmonic Choir, with over 100 musicians flying to Belfast especially for the occasion.
Tickets are certain to be snapped up quickly by fans of Morricone who will savour a mouth-watering selection of some of his most unforgettable music. His distinguished repertoire includes Once Upon a Time in America, Days of Heaven, The Untouchables, the intimate Cinema Paradiso and the enormously popular score for The Mission which starred Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons.
Ennio Morricone has won five BAFTAs for Best Score and been nominated five times for an Oscar. He finally received an Honorary Academy Award in 2007 "for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music". He is only the second composer in Oscar history to be honoured with such an award.
http://www.waterfront.co.uk/whatson/performancedetails.aspx?id=39203
Telephone bookings can be made via the Waterfront Box Office(028) 9033 4455
DUE TO DEMAND, EXTRA DATE ADDED - 18TH OCTOBER
Ennio Morricone, the Italian maestro behind some of the most instantly recognisable film music of the last forty years, will visit this island for the first time to perform his only UK and Ireland engagement this year at the Opening Concert of the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen's.
This is a rare live appearance by the Oscar-winning film legend - undoubtedly one of the most skilled, prolific and influential film composers in history. The eagerly anticipated concert takes place at Belfast's Waterfront Hall on Friday 17th October, just days before Morricone's 80th birthday. He will conduct the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra and Belfast Philharmonic Choir, with over 100 musicians flying to Belfast especially for the occasion.
Tickets are certain to be snapped up quickly by fans of Morricone who will savour a mouth-watering selection of some of his most unforgettable music. His distinguished repertoire includes Once Upon a Time in America, Days of Heaven, The Untouchables, the intimate Cinema Paradiso and the enormously popular score for The Mission which starred Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons.
Ennio Morricone has won five BAFTAs for Best Score and been nominated five times for an Oscar. He finally received an Honorary Academy Award in 2007 "for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music". He is only the second composer in Oscar history to be honoured with such an award.
http://www.waterfront.co.uk/whatson/performancedetails.aspx?id=39203
DJs of delight
Donal Dineen The Small Hours (midnight-2am Mon-Thu)
http://www.todayfm.com/sectional.asp?id=905
An Taobh Tuathail (11pm-1am Mon-Fri)
http://www.rte.ie/rnag/antaobhtuathail.html
Gilles Peterson Worldwide
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/gillespeterson
The JK Ensemble (2.30pm-4.30pm Mon-Fri)
http://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/jk/
http://www.todayfm.com/sectional.asp?id=905
An Taobh Tuathail (11pm-1am Mon-Fri)
http://www.rte.ie/rnag/antaobhtuathail.html
Gilles Peterson Worldwide
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/gillespeterson
The JK Ensemble (2.30pm-4.30pm Mon-Fri)
http://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/jk/
Thursday, 7 August 2008
I is another
The Orwell estate is to publish the great man's diaries from 9th August. You can check them out daily at: http://www.theorwellprize.co.uk/home.aspx
Ha Ha Ha
Congratulations to Declan & Caitriona and Scott and Sinead. I'm sure its put a big smile on your faces!
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The death of Solzhenitsyn
By Andrey Kurkov
Published 05 August 2008
The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov on how the author of the Gulag Archipelago, who related the terrible truth about Soviet totalitarianism, outlived his era to become something of a living monument to Russia's past
On the death of such figures as Solzhenitsyn, the phrase ‘end of an era’ is bound to come up, but Alexander Isaevich outlived his era and never truly accepted the new ‘post-soviet’ epoch.
Having sincerely dedicated his life to a desperate struggle against communism, in 1991 Solzhenitsyn suddenly found himself without a battle to fight.
From that moment his activities grew less noticeable. He was less and less asked for his commentary on developments. A note of irony appeared in the use of his nickname: the ‘Vermont Recluse’. Then in 1994 he came out of seclusion and returned to Russia.
He returned to the country he had literally torn apart in 1962 with his short story “A Day In the Life Of Ivan Denisovich”. During a meeting of the Politburo Khrushchev himself insisted on the story’s publication. It contained no direct criticism of the Soviet system. It was a simple but detailed description of one day in a camp prisoner’s life, one almost happy day.
Solzhenitsyn was immediately made a member of the writer’s Union. More of his work was published. He felt his time had come and he tried to write as much as possible, perhaps fearing that any ‘thaw’ would be temporary. However you look at it, Solzhenitsyn was of great use to Krushchev in his efforts to ‘de-Stalinize’ the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn had been sent to a camp three months before the end of the Second World War for having referred to Stalin and Lenin disrespectfully in a letter to an old school friend who was serving on the front line.
Solzhenitsyn spent eleven years in camps, special prisons, secret KGB institutions and internal exile. During that time he twice overcame cancer.
It seems he was destined to be hardened through the cruellest of suffering. He admitted that having overcome cancer for the second time, he lost all fear of death and after the publication of his first stories he lost his fear of the Soviet system.
Kruschev had been overthrown, but Solzhenitsyn still believed in the possibility of democracy in the Soviet Union. Publication of his work ceased in 1965 and, two year later, in an open letter to the Fourth Congress of the Writers’ Union of the USSR he said: “I call upon the Congress to demand and insist on the abandonment of all forms of censorship…”
In May 1967 the Soviet authorities decided to ‘deal with’ Solzhenitzyn, but the writer himself saw it the other way round; he was dealing with the Soviet Authorities.
His 1968 novels “Cancer Ward” and “In the First Circle”, which were banned from publication in the USSR, were published abroad. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn smuggled out to the west a microfilmed manuscript of his most important work – the three volumes of research into the Soviet system of repression and punishment, “The Gulag Archipelago”.
A Samisdat (homepublished) copy of this work appeared in my home at the beginning of the eighties. My older brother had managed to get hold of a copy for a couple of days. I remember trying to read it as quickly as possible.
Anyone found by the KGB in possession of it would get five years in a prison camp. By that time the author was already living in Vermont, where he had bought a house with 20 hectares of land around it to guarantee his creative isolation.
He had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1974 he had been stripped of his Soviet citizenship and sent into exile as a traitor. This was the “humane face” of the Brezhnev era. After all, instead of a special flight to Germany, he could have been thrown into a train wagon bound for the camps.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn never fell in love with the USA or the west in general and, having returned to his homeland he was disappointed to discover that his compatriots no longer read his books. Disenchantment with the Yeltsin’s form of democracy encouraged pro-Putin sympathies.
Putin himself would go to ‘take tea’ with Solzhenitsyn and discuss what was to be done with Russia. But Putin’s visits were more representative than practical – a ritual attendance at a ‘living monument’ to the fight against Communism and Stalinism.
Solzhenitsyn was unable to influence contemporary Russia, although he did provoke further discussion of the “Jewish question” in one of his last works, “Two Hundred Years Together”. That book will continue to stir emotion within Russia, but on the international plane, Solzhenitsyn will forever remain the author of “Gulag Archipelago” - that terrible and truthful book about the Soviet totalitarian regime.
Published 05 August 2008
The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov on how the author of the Gulag Archipelago, who related the terrible truth about Soviet totalitarianism, outlived his era to become something of a living monument to Russia's past
On the death of such figures as Solzhenitsyn, the phrase ‘end of an era’ is bound to come up, but Alexander Isaevich outlived his era and never truly accepted the new ‘post-soviet’ epoch.
Having sincerely dedicated his life to a desperate struggle against communism, in 1991 Solzhenitsyn suddenly found himself without a battle to fight.
From that moment his activities grew less noticeable. He was less and less asked for his commentary on developments. A note of irony appeared in the use of his nickname: the ‘Vermont Recluse’. Then in 1994 he came out of seclusion and returned to Russia.
He returned to the country he had literally torn apart in 1962 with his short story “A Day In the Life Of Ivan Denisovich”. During a meeting of the Politburo Khrushchev himself insisted on the story’s publication. It contained no direct criticism of the Soviet system. It was a simple but detailed description of one day in a camp prisoner’s life, one almost happy day.
Solzhenitsyn was immediately made a member of the writer’s Union. More of his work was published. He felt his time had come and he tried to write as much as possible, perhaps fearing that any ‘thaw’ would be temporary. However you look at it, Solzhenitsyn was of great use to Krushchev in his efforts to ‘de-Stalinize’ the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn had been sent to a camp three months before the end of the Second World War for having referred to Stalin and Lenin disrespectfully in a letter to an old school friend who was serving on the front line.
Solzhenitsyn spent eleven years in camps, special prisons, secret KGB institutions and internal exile. During that time he twice overcame cancer.
It seems he was destined to be hardened through the cruellest of suffering. He admitted that having overcome cancer for the second time, he lost all fear of death and after the publication of his first stories he lost his fear of the Soviet system.
Kruschev had been overthrown, but Solzhenitsyn still believed in the possibility of democracy in the Soviet Union. Publication of his work ceased in 1965 and, two year later, in an open letter to the Fourth Congress of the Writers’ Union of the USSR he said: “I call upon the Congress to demand and insist on the abandonment of all forms of censorship…”
In May 1967 the Soviet authorities decided to ‘deal with’ Solzhenitzyn, but the writer himself saw it the other way round; he was dealing with the Soviet Authorities.
His 1968 novels “Cancer Ward” and “In the First Circle”, which were banned from publication in the USSR, were published abroad. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn smuggled out to the west a microfilmed manuscript of his most important work – the three volumes of research into the Soviet system of repression and punishment, “The Gulag Archipelago”.
A Samisdat (homepublished) copy of this work appeared in my home at the beginning of the eighties. My older brother had managed to get hold of a copy for a couple of days. I remember trying to read it as quickly as possible.
Anyone found by the KGB in possession of it would get five years in a prison camp. By that time the author was already living in Vermont, where he had bought a house with 20 hectares of land around it to guarantee his creative isolation.
He had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1974 he had been stripped of his Soviet citizenship and sent into exile as a traitor. This was the “humane face” of the Brezhnev era. After all, instead of a special flight to Germany, he could have been thrown into a train wagon bound for the camps.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn never fell in love with the USA or the west in general and, having returned to his homeland he was disappointed to discover that his compatriots no longer read his books. Disenchantment with the Yeltsin’s form of democracy encouraged pro-Putin sympathies.
Putin himself would go to ‘take tea’ with Solzhenitsyn and discuss what was to be done with Russia. But Putin’s visits were more representative than practical – a ritual attendance at a ‘living monument’ to the fight against Communism and Stalinism.
Solzhenitsyn was unable to influence contemporary Russia, although he did provoke further discussion of the “Jewish question” in one of his last works, “Two Hundred Years Together”. That book will continue to stir emotion within Russia, but on the international plane, Solzhenitsyn will forever remain the author of “Gulag Archipelago” - that terrible and truthful book about the Soviet totalitarian regime.
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
Obama ancestry traced to 18th century Dublin
Genealogists have uncovered fresh evidence of Barack Obama’s Irish ancestry revealing the US presidential hopeful descended from an 18th century Dublin property mogul.
Previous records found Mr Obama’s fourth great-grandfather was a shoemaker in the midlands village of Moneygall whose son Fulmuth Kearney left for the US in 1850.
But researchers at Trinity College Dublin delved further into the Democratic candidate's past to find his sixth great-granduncle was a prominent Dublin businessman in the 1700s.
Wig-maker Michael Kearney brushed shoulders with Ireland’s aristocracy on a daily basis and bought and sold property throughout the city and parts of the country.
A distant cousin was also discovered - John Kearney - who served as the head of Trinity College and Bishop of the midlands Diocese of Ossory in the early 19th century.
Research director with the Trinity company heritage group Eneclann Fiona Fitzsimons said they were amazed by the discovery.
“I didn’t expect this,” she said. “When we started off we had Joseph Kearney shoemaker, that sounded like a
country shopkeeper. We were surprised to find any link to Dublin at all.
“He (Michael) made his money from periwigs and perukes, but then he invested the profits from that in a lot of property.
“I think we found 16 deeds in the registry of deeds and some of those refer to other deeds which we didn’t find.”
Ms Fitzsimons said they found a significant amount of transactions for Kearney involving the buying and selling of houses and buildings both in Dublin and in counties Tipperary and Offaly. His wig company was located near Dublin Castle.
Kearney became a Freeman of Dublin in 1718, giving him the right to practice his trade, conduct business in the capital and have a vote in elections for the city council.
Within a decade of joining he was elected Master of the Guild of Barber Surgeons. Not afraid of confrontation, when the aristocracy tried to rig Dublin City Council elections in the 1750s to put in their own candidates Kearney was prominent among the Dublin Guildsmen in opposing them.
After the 1780s the fortunes of this line of the Kearney family went into a fairly rapid decline due to a combination of the economic changes brought about after the Act of Union in 1801 and the decline in the fashion of wig wearing.
In May a Church of Ireland rector found Mr Obama’s fourth great-grandfather - Joseph Kearney - was a shoemaker from Moneygall in Co Offaly, whose son Fulmuth emigrated for the US in 1850.
“Apart from the obvious interest of a link to a US presidential candidate, the story of the Kearney family of Moneygall is a fascinating story in itself,” Ms Fitzsimons said.
Mr Obama, a married father of two daughters, was born in Hawaii in 1961, to Kenyan Barack Obama Senior and Ann Dunham, a white woman from Kansas. He graduated from Columbia University in 1983 and moved to Chicago in 1985 before studying at Harvard Law School.
PA
Previous records found Mr Obama’s fourth great-grandfather was a shoemaker in the midlands village of Moneygall whose son Fulmuth Kearney left for the US in 1850.
But researchers at Trinity College Dublin delved further into the Democratic candidate's past to find his sixth great-granduncle was a prominent Dublin businessman in the 1700s.
Wig-maker Michael Kearney brushed shoulders with Ireland’s aristocracy on a daily basis and bought and sold property throughout the city and parts of the country.
A distant cousin was also discovered - John Kearney - who served as the head of Trinity College and Bishop of the midlands Diocese of Ossory in the early 19th century.
Research director with the Trinity company heritage group Eneclann Fiona Fitzsimons said they were amazed by the discovery.
“I didn’t expect this,” she said. “When we started off we had Joseph Kearney shoemaker, that sounded like a
country shopkeeper. We were surprised to find any link to Dublin at all.
“He (Michael) made his money from periwigs and perukes, but then he invested the profits from that in a lot of property.
“I think we found 16 deeds in the registry of deeds and some of those refer to other deeds which we didn’t find.”
Ms Fitzsimons said they found a significant amount of transactions for Kearney involving the buying and selling of houses and buildings both in Dublin and in counties Tipperary and Offaly. His wig company was located near Dublin Castle.
Kearney became a Freeman of Dublin in 1718, giving him the right to practice his trade, conduct business in the capital and have a vote in elections for the city council.
Within a decade of joining he was elected Master of the Guild of Barber Surgeons. Not afraid of confrontation, when the aristocracy tried to rig Dublin City Council elections in the 1750s to put in their own candidates Kearney was prominent among the Dublin Guildsmen in opposing them.
After the 1780s the fortunes of this line of the Kearney family went into a fairly rapid decline due to a combination of the economic changes brought about after the Act of Union in 1801 and the decline in the fashion of wig wearing.
In May a Church of Ireland rector found Mr Obama’s fourth great-grandfather - Joseph Kearney - was a shoemaker from Moneygall in Co Offaly, whose son Fulmuth emigrated for the US in 1850.
“Apart from the obvious interest of a link to a US presidential candidate, the story of the Kearney family of Moneygall is a fascinating story in itself,” Ms Fitzsimons said.
Mr Obama, a married father of two daughters, was born in Hawaii in 1961, to Kenyan Barack Obama Senior and Ann Dunham, a white woman from Kansas. He graduated from Columbia University in 1983 and moved to Chicago in 1985 before studying at Harvard Law School.
PA
The Two Faces of Fergie
This Is The One - Alex Ferguson: The Uncut Story of a Football Genius
By Daniel Taylor (Aurum) £8.99 328p
For the most part, I have always thought of Alex Ferguson as a cantankerous, red faced, foul-mouthed bully who has based a large part of his success on intimidation and fear and reading this book does little to change my opinion. Of course he can be charming and humorous at times when one sees him in public, but only on his terms; only when things are going well at Manchester United and he is top of the pile, winning trophies and triumphantly looking down upon everyone else. When things at the ‘worlds biggest club’ are less rosy however, we get to see the darker side of Ferguson, the man who berates people in public, cranks the anti-media and anti-establishment paranoia up to absurd levels and uses techniques such as the infamous ‘hairdryer’ treatment on anyone who dares step out of line or raise any issue of contention surrounding the Red Devils.
There is no enigma lying at the heart of Ferguson, we all know exactly what makes him tick: winning and to paraphrase the man himself, knocking teams of their f***ing perch. What is fascinating though is how the most successful and long-serving manager at the highest level of the English game possesses some kind of split personality, from the street brawler brought up in working-class Glasgow, with the steely persona and caricature of steam blowing out of his ears, throwing tea-cups around the dressing room, to the man who is reportedly kind and warm to those who are close to him, someone who becomes a surrogate father figure to many of his players, and the generous spirit that gives up his time readily for charity work.
This contrast is captured perfectly in Daniel Taylor’s revealing and behind-the-scenes account of two very different seasons for the legendary football boss in 2005-06 and 2006-7.
The former was probably Ferguson’s least successful year at the club, if you discount his first few seasons after his arrival in 1986, and it is here, through the eyes of the Guardian’s Taylor and the Manchester football press pack, that we get to see the bus-pass eligible manager behaving at his worse, picking fights with anyone around and losing his cool at the slightest little thing. On certain occasions during pre-match press conferences, Ferguson would lose his temper so much with journalists about their questioning that he would swing his arm and smash their Dictaphones lined up on the table into a nearby wall; his rather extreme way of saying the interview was over. Another time he took exception to what one journalist had written that day, so made him leave the briefing and frog marched the bemused hack into the nearby toilets and told him to stay there until everyone else had finished their interviews. There are countless insights like this in the book of the shouting matches, bans, and general rollicking grown men doing their jobs faced every week from Ferguson (although Taylor must be a shrewd cookie as he never seemed to be on the end of any, but has plenty of stories about less fortunate journos). And the absurdity of the relationship between Ferguson and the press is highlighted best when he even ends up boycotting MUTV, the club’s own satellite channel which is known cynically as Pravda TV, because a presenter had the temerity to talk on air about the formation of the team.
Of course journalists are not whiter than white and Ferguson openly admits that he does not like what they do and what the modern media has become, but the relationship is still a two-way thing. He often complained about what they had written as being ‘shite’, but this would be on occasions when he left the press high and dry by holding an eighty second press conference or most bitterly of all, the day when Old Trafford legend Roy Keane abruptly left the club, the Manchester United boss met the media half an hour before the story broke and told them everything was fine with the Irishman.
From reading this account, Taylor’s position as the Guardian’s Manchester United correspondent is not an enviable one, nor it seems is any journalist’s role dealing with the club. The point can be argued that most managers in the pressure cooker that is the Premier League have their own particular faults and flaws, but nonetheless it is hard to imagine Arsene Wenger, Rafa Benitez or Mark Hughes behaving in such a way with people simply trying to do their jobs. Many Manchester United fans reading this book will also argue that they don’t care about how Ferguson behaves as long as the team is winning, and that fickleness is highlighted extensively in t
he first half of the book, when many supporters wanted shot of their greatest ever manager after a couple of quiet seasons on the trophy front.This is a book of two halves, to twist the classic football cliché, and from Taylor’s writing during the following 2006-07 season we see the other side to Ferguson: joking, likeable, self-effacing and it is a relief because it breaks the routine of continuous rows and run-ins from the first half of the book, which nearly slips toward monotony. The reason why we see the flip side of Fergie’s personality, the softer touches so to speak, in the second part of the book is simple: his team are winning and on top again and that seems to make the Scot a whole lot easier to live with, although one wonders why he could not be like that most of the time. Nevertheless, we see Fergie doing what he does best in rising to the challenge of Chelsea, new kid on the block Jose Mourinho and their oil funded mega-millions. He shows his man-management skills once again in healing the Wayne Rooney and Ronaldo World Cup rift and also his ruthless streak in unceremoniously dumping his most prolific striker and Old Trafford hero Ruud Van Nistelrooy for the good of the team. Consequently Manchester United reclaimed the Premier League title, made the final of the FA Cup and semi-final of the Champions League; a vast improvement from the season before, which produced only the Carling Cup.
The Alex Ferguson we leave behind by the end of the book is a lot more mellow and magnanimous and Taylor puts forward the theory that someone very close to him, perhaps a family member, had a talk with him in the close-season between the two documented here, to explain that life is too short and everything does not have to be a battle or fight. This may be the case and it has paid further dividends most recently when Ferguson won the Premier League again and the Champions League for the second time. Like Taylor’s book, that season too will surely provide a roller coaster read, but pity the poor football journalists if the Scotsman starts to come under any pressure again.
Niall McGarrigle
Alan Silltoe Interview (Village Magazine)
THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER
Niall McGarrigle speaks to Alan Sillitoe, the writer of such modern classics as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, who disputes his early labels of "Angry Young Man" and voice of the working class
Shortly after Alan Sillitoe had his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, published in 1958, he went to visit his father to show him a copy of the book. His father could neither read nor write, but when his son said, “Look Dad, my story has been made into a book”, Christopher Sillitoe paused for a moment before exclaiming: “Bloody hell! You’ll never have to work again!”
But work is what Sillitoe has done ever since, as the author of some 50 books, including poetry, plays and stories for small children. He has driven himself continuously in his writing for the last half century, somewhat like the character Smith in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, who develops his skill and stamina with a daily regime of hard exercise and toil. The crucial difference between Sillitoe and Smith however, is that the author always wants to get over the finishing line; he always wants to reach the goal in front of him.
Now aged 79, the Nottingham-born novelist still maintains a heavy regime of writing for several hours a day, seven days a week, “No Sabbath for me”, he has been quoted as saying. And at a recent literary talk in Derry, he says he will continue to work for as long as he can, as he strives to perfect his style of “clear, uncomplicated English”.
Dressed in a tweed jacket and cream chinos, the small-framed Sillitoe explained: “Between the 10 years I started writing and getting published in 1958, I had to learn a new method of communication. And it wasn’t until about half way through these years that I started reading a wonderful book by Thomas De Quincy called The Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
“And as I read I could see at last that good English was clear English. And that was a stage that I had to fight to get to – mixing up this clear English with the ordinary speak of the people, so I could see my way through to writing about the folk I had grown up with. It was as complicated and as simple as that.”
Sillitoe grew up in a home that was devoid of books and left school at the age of 14 to work in the local Raleigh factory in Nottingham. However he did find some inspiration for his early literary ambitions close to home.
“When World War II began I had a couple of cousins who had been called up into the army and in about six weeks they deserted and came home,” revealed the author. “But they had to find a way to make a living and the thing that came easiest to them was to become burglars in the city of Nottingham. And when they visited our home, they would tell us details of what they did and I thought to myself ‘Some day I might write about them!’
“So I bought a large notebook and wrote down details of their appearances, where they lived and of course added in the times and addresses of the shops and offices they had been in. I thought this was an extremely good idea as a young writer, until one day I was at school and my mother found this book and was horrified at the explicit evidence she had discovered. When I came home she clipped me over the head and threw the book into the fire and said ‘What are you doing? You’ll get us all arrested!’”
With his early writing ambitions in check, Sillitoe went off to join the RAF in 1946 for three years as a wireless operator in Malaya but during this time he was struck down with TB and laid up in hospital for close to 12 months. It was here that he began reading many of the great books in the world and decided to devote himself to writing, with the aid of his military pension.
“At first I thought this was a disastrous experience as it meant I would be kept in hospital for a very long time,” said Sillitoe. “But in a sense it worked out well because during that time I began to read seriously: the Bible in its entirety, all of Shakespeare, all the great novels from Russia, Ireland and America and so on. And it was during that time that I decided to become a writer, I think to prevent me from going mad. Looking back now, it was extremely important I became familiar with all those great books, because to become a writer you need to know what has went before you.”
After his recovery, Sillitoe travelled and lived in France and Spain, where he met his wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight, and where he also befriended Robert Graves (“A great piece of fortune as he would lend me many of his wonderful books”), who helped him find his own voice and subjects that he could write honestly about. He explained: “The first novel I attempted was a mish-mash of all the things I had been reading at the time, Huxley, DH Lawrence, Dostoevsky and so on. It didn’t work, but being young I thought it was a work of genius!
“Fortunately, I gave him (Graves) one of my dud novels to read and he said that I knew how to tell a story, but why not write about the place that I grew up in – Nottingham? The advice clicked in and as a result I produced Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.”
Sillitoe’s first two books, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), remain his best known works and those most loved by his readers, despite the fact the author feels his other writing is of a higher standing. Both stories were made into seminal feature films soon after they were published. They starred Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay respectively and launched the writer into the heights of popular and critical acclaim.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was a tale of working-class life through the roguish and masculine Arthur Seaton and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was a short story narrated by an angry and anti-establishment Borstal boy who throws a cross-country race to spite his guardians.
Consequently, Sillitoe was described as part of the generation in 1950’s literature known as ‘The Angry Young Men’ and was said to have provided a voice in mainstream culture for the working classes – two labels that he strongly denies: “I didn’t feel that way at all. I had no real class feelings, I had no idea what working class meant; I certainly wasn’t working class. When people talked about the generation of angry young men that appeared in British literature in the 1950s I certainly wasn’t one of them – I was living in Spain at the time!
“I wrote Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in Mallorca. I was sitting under an orange tree and started writing in my notebook about a young man falling down the stairs in a pub after 15 pints and seven gins. I finished the story and sent it to a London magazine and I thought it was a reasonable effort.
“The story was rejected however, but you never waste anything, so I thought I would continue this adventure of a young man working as a labourer in a factory in my home town and the novel began to take shape.”
The book was subsequently given to an agent in London. It was sent out to publishers but came back several times, with one claiming that no matter how well it was written, the ordinary people would have no interest in it. Fortunately for Sillitoe and every generation of book readers since, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was sent out to one final agent, WH Allen, who decided to publish the story.
It was without doubt the emergence of a new talent in mainstream British literature and one that Melvyn Bragg noted later as: “a writer who has tried to tell the truth about a section of society that was, until he came along, largely ignored".
“Of course every writer needs their own thumbprint and generally you have some connection in reality with the person you are writing about,” explained Sillitoe. To emphasise the point further during the Derry talk he produced his own Morse code key – a skill he learned during his spell with the RAF – and sent out the message “Long life and good luck to you all” to the audience. It was an apt device in which to display the importance he firmly places on simple, uncomplicated language.
He added: “Once you learn Morse code as a language it has a kind of poetic rhythm; it goes into your brain and you never forget it, like English. And for me it became a kind of therapy. If I am sitting in my work room in London completely fed up and not able to write another comma, I listen in on the radio for Morse code and pick up all sorts of arcane messages. It may be Russian bombers flying over the Artic Circle or messages circulating from the French police. It is a language that fascinates me to this day.”
A similar thing can be said of Alan Sillitoe’s writing; it is a language that is also plain and uncomplicated, and it too always carries a message that is well worth decoding.
What's the frequency, kenny?
The best little radio station in Ireland: www.icrfm.ie
Why not check out my weekly radio show 'On The Record' every Thursday 5-6pm?
aka 'The Badly Peeled Spuds Set'. It is a veritable gold rush of top tunes linking up the goodness of electronica, hip hop, funk, rock and much much more.
Some call it massage for the soul, some say it's so dope the pope should listen to it, and then there are those who put it on while white-water rafting.
Just go to: http://www.icrfm.ie/live.htm to stream the show live or check my blog each week for a download link and play list of the latest offering.
Keep on keepin' on brothers and sisters!
Why not check out my weekly radio show 'On The Record' every Thursday 5-6pm?
aka 'The Badly Peeled Spuds Set'. It is a veritable gold rush of top tunes linking up the goodness of electronica, hip hop, funk, rock and much much more.
Some call it massage for the soul, some say it's so dope the pope should listen to it, and then there are those who put it on while white-water rafting.
Just go to: http://www.icrfm.ie/live.htm to stream the show live or check my blog each week for a download link and play list of the latest offering.
Keep on keepin' on brothers and sisters!
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